1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to a learning control information generation method, an apparatus and a computer-readable medium storing a learning control information generation program. More particularly, the present invention relates to a learning control information generation method, an apparatus and a computer-readable medium storing a learning control information generation program in an information providing system which includes an information providing server, an information terminal which requests, receives and displays information, and a communication means such as a computer network which connects them. In the information providing system, the information terminal sends a request for information selected by a user to the information providing server. The information providing server selects information based on control information which is provided beforehand. The information providing system may be, for example, an information providing system using the Internet, such as the WWW (World-Wide Web) system.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the following, a hypertext system will be described as a first conventional technique.
The hypertext system includes an information server which stores information and an information terminal which obtains and displays the information according to a user""s operation, the information server and the information terminal being connected via the Internet.
FIG. 1 is a block diagram showing the hypertext system. The technique is described, for example, in T. Berners-Lee et al., xe2x80x9cThe World-Wide Webxe2x80x9d, Communications of the ACM, vol. 37(8), pp. 76-82. The system shown in FIG. 1 includes an information providing server 10, an information terminal 40 and a computer network 30. The information terminal 40 and the information providing server 10 may be two or more respectively.
The information providing server 10 includes an information file 20 which stores providing information, a receiving part 11 which receives a request, a retrieving part 12 which retrieves a page from the information file 20 based on the request and a sending part 13 which sends the retrieved page to the information terminal 40. The page is a unit of information provided to the information terminal 40 from the information providing server 10.
FIG. 2 shows an example of a construction of information provided by the information providing server 10. FIG. 3 shows an example of the information provided by the server which is displayed on the information terminal 40. The page describes not only text information which is visualized by the information terminal 40 but also information which is not visualized and is associated with a part of the text information. The information is called markup information. In the following, the markup information will be described taking the WWW as an example.
The markup information is distinguished from the visualized text information by bracketing with descriptors xe2x80x9c less than xe2x80x9d and xe2x80x9c greater than xe2x80x9d as shown in FIG. 2. The markup information is placed before and after a part of text information (which will be called element information) which is associated with other information. A part before the element is called a start tag, and a part after the element is called an end tag. The start tag describes one tag identifier, zero or more numbers of attribute names and/or an attribute name and a value of the attribute name in a format shown below.
 less than tag identifier attribute attribute=value greater than 
The end tag is formatted as follows.
 less than /tag identifier greater than 
There are various kinds of tag identifiers. A representative example is an anchor tag which is shown in FIG. 2. The anchor tag indicates that there exists another page which is associated with an element (which is called an anchor) corresponding to the anchor tag. The identifier is xe2x80x9caxe2x80x9d or xe2x80x9cAxe2x80x9d. As shown is FIG. 3, an under score is displayed at the element part on a screen of the information terminal such that a user is notified of existence of the associated information. As an attribute of the anchor tag, there is an xe2x80x9chrefxe2x80x9d attribute which indicates a location of the associated information. A format called xe2x80x9cURLxe2x80x9d shown below is widely used as a format of the value of the xe2x80x9chrefxe2x80x9d attribute.
href=communication protocol name://server name/page identifier
The communication protocol shown above indicates a processing method in which an information providing server and an information terminal transmit/receive information. In FIG. 2, HTTP which is widely used in the WWW is specified. The attribute value which is specified by the href attribute is also called link information. Generally, the link information can be defined as URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) information which is included in the markup information.
When a user selects desired information, for example, by clicking on an anchor part of a page displayed on the screen shown in FIG. 3 with a mouse, for example, the information terminal requests and obtains information based on link information corresponding to the anchor part, and displays the information on the screen.
By repeating the above-mentioned process, the user obtains necessary information one after another.
An execution result of a program executed in a server can be obtained by specifying a program name executed in the server and an argument in an href format shown below:
href=communication protocol name://server name/program name and argument=value.
Next, a personal adapting type hypertext system, which is a second conventional method, will be described. The above-mentioned first conventional method can not be used for education since appropriate information corresponding to user""s circumstances can not be provided. The personal adapting type hypertext system changes providing information contents so that the information contents are adapted to the user""s personal information. The personal adapting type hypertext system is disclosed in Japanese patent application No. 7-313053, xe2x80x9cInformation providing method and information providing systemxe2x80x9d, and Japanese patent application No. 9-124309, xe2x80x9cInformation providing method, apparatus and a computer-readable medium storing information providing programxe2x80x9d. The personal adapting type hypertext system can be called a web-based training system.
A configuration of the personal adapting type hypertext system will be described with reference to FIG. 4. The personal adapting type hypertext system includes an information terminal 40, an information providing server 10 and a computer network 30, which are also included in the normal hypertext system, and a learning support server 50.
The learning support server 50 includes a receiving part 51, a requesting part 52, a personal information file retrieving part 55, an adapting part 53, and a sending part 54. A personal history file 60, a scenario definition file 70, a target definition file 80 and a link rewriting definition file 90 are connected to the personal information file retrieving part 55.
The scenario definition file 70 will be described in the following. The scenario is a description used for determining a display order of information when a user learns something. The scenario will be described by taking a three-layer hierarchical structure as an example with reference to FIG. 5 since generally learning information contents have a hierarchical structure including a chapter, a section, a paragraph and the like. Information having the chapter structure has three items which are a chapter number, a title and information (which is called a pointer) indicating a location of a table describing information of the section which belongs to the chapter. Likewise, the section includes three items of a section number, a title and a pointer to a paragraph belonging to the section. The paragraph information includes a paragraph number, a title, a page name and a pointer to a target definition table which corresponds to the paragraph contents. A table in which a scenario is described is called a scenario table.
Next, the target definition file 80 will be described. A learning target is a concept which a user is to learn, which concept is represented by a hierarchical structure. In the following, the target definition file 80 will be described with reference to FIG. 6. A learning target includes a target name and sub-targets into which the target is divided. The target definition file 80 includes the target name and pointers to the sub-targets which belong to the target. The sub-target includes a sub-target name and a pointer to a paragraph of a scenario for learning the sub-target or to a question for testing whether the user has learned the sub-target.
For the above-mentioned two definition files, all files do not necessarily have the same number of layers for chapters. That is, for example, a chapter may have two layers or four layers. In addition, the pointer which is defined in the scenario and the target have a list structure shown in FIG. 7 so that a plurality of pointers which point to each other can be represented.
Next, the link rewriting definition file 90 will be described with reference to FIG. 8. The link rewriting definition file 90 has control information for rewriting a link name when the link name which is specified as an original link name exists in a page specified by a page name. More specifically, when a link which has an anchor name of xe2x80x9cnext screenxe2x80x9d exists, generally the link points to a specific page. If the link is converted in advance to a xe2x80x9cNEXTxe2x80x9d command which requests a next screen appropriate for the progress of learning of the user, the user can receive an appropriate page. In addition, the learning support server supports various learning support commands such as an xe2x80x9cINDEXxe2x80x9d command which enables the terminal to display the table of learning contents including the user""s progress, and a xe2x80x9cDICxe2x80x9d command which provides a dictionary function in accordance with the user""s progress. Each command can be applied to anchors such as xe2x80x9ctable of contentsxe2x80x9d and xe2x80x9csearchxe2x80x9d which may be commonly seen on a hypertext of the WWW.
The learning support server 50 stores pages which the user has finished reading and learning targets which the user has understood at some point in time in the personal history file 60. When the user requests a next page, the learning support server provides appropriate information based on the scenario definition file 70 and the target definition file 80.
For example, assuming that the user is executing xe2x80x9cproblem 1 of section 2 (how to capture mail) in chapter 2 (how to read an E-mail)xe2x80x9d, when the user solves the practice problem and sends the result to the learning support server 50, the learning support server marks the result and determines whether the user passes the section. When the user passes the section, the learning process goes to a chapter three xe2x80x9chow to write an E-mailxe2x80x9d. When the user does not pass, the server supports the user, for example, by presenting a page on which the same target as the target corresponding to the problem which the user could not solve is set. For example, when the user could not solve the problem 1, since it means that the user does not fully understand the sub-targets xe2x80x9chow to openxe2x80x9d and xe2x80x9chow to closexe2x80x9d, the server goes back the user""s learning process to paragraph 1 and paragraph 2 on which those sub-targets are set.
The process by the learning support server will be described with reference to FIG. 9. First, the user sends a command (for example, xe2x80x9cNEXTxe2x80x9d) to the learning support server. The server checks the scenario definition file and the target definition file against the user""s learning history thus far, and determines a screen which will be displayed next. Then, the learning support server obtains the determined screen from the information providing server in place of the user""s terminal. The learning support server analyzes the obtained file, and rewrites link information into a command for the learning support server, when there is an applicable item in a command conversion file, and sends the command to the user.
According to the above-mentioned process, the user can receive information appropriate for the user""s learning progress while the user reads the same visualized information as normal hypertext information and the information terminal sends various commands to the learning support server.
According to the above-mentioned second conventional method, a sophisticated information providing service adaptable to each user can be realized. However, for realizing the second conventional method, it is necessary to prepare control information which includes the scenario definition file, the target definition file and the link rewriting definition file, which is a problem since the preparation cost is high.
In addition, there are cases where information maintained by the information providing server may be modified by an administrator of the information providing server with no advance notice. As a result, the control information can not maintain consistency with the information in the information providing server, and thereby the learning support server can not operate appropriately.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a learning control information generation method, an apparatus and a computer readable medium storing a learning control information generation program which automatically generate learning control information from existing hypertext pages.
The above object of the present invention is achieved by a learning control information generation method in a web-based training system which uses the WWW for education, the learning control information generation method comprising the steps of:
specifying hypertext information which is processed first;
requesting and obtaining the hypertext information;
analyzing the hypertext information, and obtaining element information and link information;
storing relations between the hypertext information, the element information and the link information in a storage by using a list structure;
detecting a relation which corresponds with a condition of a rule for generating learning control information necessary for the web-based training system from the relation between the hypertext information, the element information and the link information; and
executing an action of the rule and outputting the learning control information.
According to the above-mentioned invention, a hyperlink structure of a page specified by a user is analyzed. Then, a scenario and a target which is linked with the scenario are determined based on link information and anchor information included in the page by executing a predetermined rule. The scenario and the target can be used as a scenario definition file and a target definition file.
The above-mentioned method may further comprise the steps of:
asking a user whether the rule needs to be executed after the relation is detected; and
executing the action of the rule only when the user accepts.
According to the above-mentioned invention, a user""s judgment can be applied so that learning control information can be generated more appropriately.
The above-mentioned method may further comprise the steps of:
asking a user to select what process needs to be applied to a hyperlink structure to which the rule can not be applied; and
executing the process which the user selects.
Accordingly, even when a hyperlink structure corresponds with the rule condition, desired learning control information can be generated.
The above object of the present invention is also achieved by a learning control information generation method in a web-based training system which uses the WWW for education, the learning control information generation method comprising the steps of:
obtaining a file corresponding to a first page when a user specifies the first page to the web-based training system;
analyzing contents of the first page, obtaining a page linked from a page in the file one after another and analyzing every hyperlink structure;
storing a result of the analyzing step in a storage by using a list structure, the storage being for storing a hyperlink structure comprising a page table having information including a file name of each page, an anchor included in each page and an anchor table having a pointer to a page table corresponding to a linked page; and
applying at least a rule to the information stored in the storage, the rule being for generating a scenario table, a link rewriting table and a target definition table which are learning control information necessary for the web-based training system, and generating the learning control information.
According to the above-mentioned invention, a hyperlink structure of a page specified by a user is analyzed. Then, a scenario and a target which is linked with the scenario are determined based on link information and anchor information included in the page by executing a predetermined rule. The scenario and the target can be used as a scenario definition file and a target definition file.
In the above-mentioned learning control information generation method, the rule may comprise:
a condition for determining whether the rule is applied; and
an action which is executed when the condition is satisfied.
In the above-mentioned learning control information generation method, the action may comprise the steps of:
setting a title in a first scenario table;
generating a second scenario table;
setting a starting point page table and at least an intermediate page table in the second scenario table; and
setting a pointer to the second scenario table in the first scenario table.
According to the above-mentioned invention, a scenario table can be generated effectively from contents having a structure corresponding to xe2x80x9cchapterxe2x80x9d or xe2x80x9csectionxe2x80x9d.
In the above-mentioned learning control information generation method, the condition may be satisfied when at least two page tables of a plurality of page tables which are connected by a conjunction which represents a continuation have the same parent anchor table.
In addition, in the above-mentioned learning control information generation method,
the condition is satisfied when at least two page tables of a plurality of page tables which are connected by a conjunction which represents a continuation have the same parent anchor table; and
the action comprises the steps of:
adding a record in a link rewriting file;
setting a page name of a starting point page table;
setting a page name of an intermediate page table as an original link name;
setting the conjunction as an anchor; and
setting a command corresponding to the conjunction.
According to the above-mentioned invention, a link rewriting file can be generated efficiently.
In the above-mentioned learning control information generation method, according to the rule, the learning control information generation method may further comprise the steps of:
setting, when a dictionary page exists, all terms of the dictionary page in a target definition table; and
linking, when a page having a link to a term of the dictionary page exists in a scenario table, a record corresponding to the page in the scenario table and a record corresponding to the term in the target definition table.
According to the above-mentioned invention, a target definition table can be generated efficiently.
In addition, in order to achieve the above-mentioned object, a learning control information generation apparatus and computer readable medium storing a learning control information generation program which are applicable to carrying out the above-mentioned learning control information generation method are provided.